Have you seen a japanese newspaper? the characters alone are very information dense. and a newspaper front page can be very information dense just by the nature of the language/writing system.
otherwise, a lot of japanese webpages just seem impossible to navigate to me. Some images are clickable, some aren't, you still have to scroll to reach where you're going. It's just a bit like a maze, and a lot of what you see is kind of useless.
To be fair, Japanese headlines use a specific writing style that is much more compressed than normal text, like how English newspaper headlines drop words like “a” or “is” to save space.
if you actually think China would even entertain the idea of funding some of the scientific research conducted in the US over the past few decades, you have a fantasy view of what is going on outside the US. That political controversy wouldn't even arise because it's such a nonstarter that it could never even become a controversy.
Past being the key point. Because, right now it's all Dumpty all the time, until we boot his weak tools and fools November. I'm confident we are stronger than that two bit corrupt fraud, and will get back to where science funding is a priority. Hopefully our state of affairs is much more temporary than what China is subjected to. But there's absolutely no question whether the dunce parade in the US is anti science.
the amount of people arrested for online activity in England is not the best example to use if you're arguing that such events are rare.
otherwise, your incredulity to such a belief is why the far-right continues to gain a constituency in Europe and elsewhere. so instead of dismissing the concern, which fuels the far-right, you could just acknowledge it is a real thing people are experiencing, and that it doesn't help a liberal free society to criminalize thoughts that are unsavory to the political elite.
The "real thing people are experiencing" is posting unambiguous hate speech or calls for violence, and then getting in legal trouble for it. Calling it "online activity" or "just sharing their opinion online" is the actual blatant misrepresentation of what's happening on the ground, akin to saying someone robbing a store was "jailed merely for getting food for dinner that night."
it's all about funding. for every 1 person nervous about intellectual safety in the US, there are 50–100 waiting to fill that spot, if not 1,000–10,000. Funding has been cut in academia, and less positions are available as a result. No country is remarkably filling this gap, aside from a hilariously few more availabilities and some more graduate student positions (who operate as the scientific labor in Europe and other countries, before graduating and having to come to the US for job opportunity).
As others have pointed out, presumably the outcome is that higher value scientists are favored, and higher impact research is demanded. When industry demands certain research, the funding appears because private entities will fund those positions and those grants. The widespread funding of all avenues of science is a great feature of American intellectual culture and hopefully it doesn't vanish. But it was a remarkably uneconomical arrangement and a total aberration of history, so I wouldn't hold my breath about it sticking around through the tides of history, it was more of a fluke, and many in academia wishing to regenerate that fluke are a bit delusional and a bit tied to the idea of a golden era like the boomers dreaming of the 1950s suburbs. A great deal of research is important science, but totally worthless for the foreseeable future on an economic basis. We might not yet conceive of why this research does have economic value, but it's so abstracted that as it stands, the value isn't tangible and it's thus impossible to defend reasonably.
Scientific freedom doesn't mean the freedom to expect a subsidized career on the basis of non-lucrative research. It's more of a privilege to have such a lifestyle that is downstream of a wealthy empire. Since America is going bankrupt, the dollar-reaper is coming for the superfluous. So, there goes your funding for conure breeding or the health benefits of community gardens and expect more stability if you're researching crop diseases or livestock vector research.
There are weapons that can permanently paralyze an entire city. Not paralyze infrastructure or traffic... but permanent incurable paralysis of all the people in any area exposed to the weapon. That is still a 20th century technology.
That's a hell of a claim, and unless you're talking about some kind of chemical spray or seeding some weaponized microbe across the city, you could at least post a link or name that explains what it is.
> the economic situation in Europe is much more dire than the US...
Is it, though? The US reports by far the highest levels of lifetime literal homelessness, which is three times greater than in countries like Germany. Homeless people on Europe aren't denied access to free healthcare, primary or even tertiary.
Why do you think the US, in spite of it's GDP, features so low in rankings such as human development index or quality of life?
Yet people live better. Goes to show you shouldn't optimise for crude, raw GDP as an end in itself, only as a means for your true end: health, quality of life, freedom, etc.
In many of the metrics, yeah. But Americans can afford larger houses and more stuff essentially, which isn't necessarily a good replacement for general quality of life things.
> In many of the metrics, yeah. But Americans can afford larger houses and more stuff essentially, which isn't necessarily a good replacement for general quality of life things.
I think this is the sort of red herring that prevents the average US citizen from realizing how screwed over they are. Again, the median household income in the US is lower than in some European countries. On top of this, the US provides virtually no social safety net or even socialized services to it's population.
The fact that the average US citizen is a paycheck away from homelessness and the US ranks so low in human development index should be a wake-up call.
You're missing the point, language can be tricky. Technically, the state confiscating wealth derived from your labor through taxes is a form of robbery and slavery. It used to be called corvée. But the words being used have a connotation of something much more brutal and unrewarding. This isn't a political statement, I'm not a libertarian who believes all taxation is evil robbery and needs to be abolished. I'm just pointing out by the definition of slavery aka forced labor, and robbery aka confiscation of wealth, the state employs both of those tactics to fund the programs you described.
> Technically, the state confiscating wealth derived from your labor through taxes is a form of robbery and slavery.
Without the state, you wouldn't have wealth. Heck there wouldn't even be the very concept of property, only what you could personally protect by force! Not to mention other more prosaic aspects: if you own a company, the state maintains the roads that your products ship through, the schools that educate your workers, the cities and towns that house your customers... In other words the tax is not "money that is yours and that the evil state steals from you", but simply "fair money for services rendered".
To a large extent, yes. That's why the arrangement is so precarious, it is necessary in many regards, but a totalitarian regime or dictatorship can use this arrangement in a nefarious manner and tip the scale toward public resentment. Balancing things to avoid the revolutionary mob is crucial. Trading your labor for protection is sensible, but if the exchange becomes exorbitant, then it becomes a source of revolt.
> You're missing the point, language can be tricky. Technically, the state confiscating wealth derived from your labor through taxes is a form of robbery and slavery.
You're letting your irrational biases show.
To start off, social security contributions are not a tax.
But putting that detail aside, do you believe that paying a private health insurance also represents slavery and robbery? Are you a slave to a private pension fund?
Are you one of those guys who believes unions exploit workers whereas corporations are just innocent bystanders that have a neutral or even positive impact on workers lives and well being?
No, I'm a progressive and believe in socialism. But taxation is de facto a form of unpaid labor taken by the force of the state. If you don't pay your taxes, you will go to jail. It is both robbery and slavery, and in the ideal situation, it is a benevolent sort of exchange, despite existing in the realm of slavery/robbery. In a totalitarian system, it become malevolent very quickly. It also can be seen as not benevolent when the exchange becomes onerous and not beneficial. Arguing this is arguing emotionally and not rationally using language with words that have definitions.
social security contributions are a mandatory payment to the state taken from your wages, they are a tax, it's a compulsory reduction in your income. Private health insurance is obviously not mandatory or compulsory, that is different, clearly. Your last statement is just irrelevant because you assume I'm a libertarian for pointing out the reality of the exchange taking place in the socialist system.
I'd be very interested in hearing which definition of "socialism" aligns with those obviously libertarian views?
> If you don't pay your taxes, you will go to jail. It is both robbery and slavery [...] Arguing this is arguing emotionally and not rationally using language with words that have definitions.
Indulging in the benefits of living in a society, knowingly breaking its laws, being appalled by entirely predictable consequences of those action, and finally resorting to incorrect usage of emotional language like "slavery" and "robbery" to deflect personal responsibility is childish.
Taxation is payment in exchange for services provided by the state and your opinion (or ignorance) of those services doesn't make it "robbery" nor "slavery". Your continued participation in society is entirely voluntary and you're free to move to a more ideologically suitable destination at any time.
What do you mean? Is this one of those sovereign citizen type of arguments?
The government provides a range of services that are deemed to be broadly beneficial to society. Your refusal of that service doesn't change the fact that the service is being provided.
If you don't like the services you can get involved in politics or you can leave, both are valid options, while claiming that you're being enslaved and robbed is not.
Not at all. If it happens to you even when you don’t want it and don’t want to pay for it (and are forced to pay for it on threat of violence), that is no service.
Literally nobody alive today was “involved in politics” when the US income tax amendment was legislated.
Also, you can’t leave; doubly so if you are wealthy enough. Do you not know about the exit tax?
Good idea, lets make taxes optional or non enforceable. What comes next. Oh right, nobody pays. The 'government' you have collapses and then strong men become warlords and set up fiefdoms that fight each other. Eventually some authoritarian gathers up enough power to unite everyone by force and you have your totalitarian system you didn't want, after a bunch of violence you didn't want.
We assume you're libertarian because you are spouting libertarian ideas that just don't work in reality.
If nobody pays them, then in a democracy they shouldn’t exist. The government derives its power from the consent of the governed. If the majority of people don’t want to be forced to pay taxes, then why do we pretend to have a democracy and compulsory taxation? It can’t be both.
What you seem to be arguing for is a dictatorship, where a majority of people don’t want something, but are forced into it anyway.
FYI the United States survived (and thrived) for well over a century without income taxes. Your theory that the state immediately collapses without income taxes doesn’t really hold up.
The taxes will be most burdensome for the wealthiest and most productive of institutions, which is generally why these arrangements collapse economies and nations. UBI is hard to implement because it incentivizes non-productive behavior and disincentivizes productive activity. This creates economic crisis, taxes are basically a smaller scale version of this, UBI is like a more comprehensive wealth redistribution scheme. The creation of a syndicate (in this case, the state) to steal from the productive to give to the non-productive is a return to how humanity functioned before the creation of state-like structures when marauders and bandits used violence to steal from those who created anything. Eventually, the state arose to create arrangements and contracts to prevent theft, but later become the thief itself, leading to economic collapse and the cyclical revolutionary cycle.
So, AI may certainly bring about UBI, but the corporations that are being milked by the state to provide wealth to the non-productive will begin to foment revolution along with those who find this arrangement unfair, and the productive activity of those especially productive individuals will be directed toward revolution instead of economic productivity. Companies have made nations many times before, and I'm sure it'll happen again.
The problem is the "productive activity" is rather hard to define if there's so much "AI" (be it classical ML, LLM, ANI, AGI, ASI, whatever) around that nearly everything can be produced by nearly no one.
The destruction of the labour theory of value has been a goal of "tech" for a while, but if they achieve it, what's the plan then?
Assuming humans stay in control of the AIs because otherwise all bets are off, in a case where a few fabulously wealthy (or at least "onwing/controlling", since the idea of wealth starts to become fuzzy) industrialists control the productive capacity for everything from farming to rocketry and there's no space for normal people to participate in production any more, how do you even denominate the value being "produced"? Who is it even for? What do they need to give in return? What can they give in return?
> Assuming humans stay in control of the AIs because otherwise all bets are off, in a case where a few fabulously wealthy (or at least "onwing/controlling", since the idea of wealth starts to become fuzzy) industrialists control the productive capacity for everything from farming to rocketry and there's no space for normal people to participate in production any more
Why do the rest of humanity even have to participate in this? Just continue on the way things were before without any super AI. Start new businesses that don’t use AI and hire humans to work there.
Because with presumably tiny marginal costs of production, the AI owners can flood and/or buy out your human-powered economy.
You'd need a very united front and powerful incentives to prevent, say, anyone buying AI-farmed wheat when it's half the cost of human-farmed (say). If you don't prevent that, Team AI can trade wheat (and everything else) for human economy money and then dominate there.
But if AI can do anything that human labor can do, what would even be the incentive for AI owners to farm wheat and sell it to people? They can just have their AIs directly produce the things they want.
It seems like the only things they would need are energy and access to materials for luxury goods. Presumably they could mostly lock the "human economy" out of access to these things through control over AI weapons, but there would likely be a lot of arable land that isn't valuable to them.
Outside of malice, there doesn't seem to be much reason to block the non-technological humans from using the land they don't need. Maybe some ecological argument, the few AI-enabled elites don't want billions of humans that they no longer need polluting "their" Earth?
When was the last the techno-industrialist elite class said "what we have is enough"?
In this scenario, the marginal cost of taking everything else over is almost zero. Just tell the AI you want it taken over and it handles it. You'd take it over just for risk mitigation, even if you don't "need" it. Better to control it since it's free to do so.
Allowing a competing human economy is resources left on the table. And control of resources is the only lever of power left when labour is basically free.
> Maybe some ecological argument
There's a political angle too. 7 (or however many it will be) billion humans free to do their own thing is a risky free variable.
The assumption here that UBI "incentivizes non-productive behavior and disincentivizes productive activity" is the part that doesn't make sense. What do you think universal means? How does it disincentivize productive activity if it is provided to everyone regardless of their income/productivity/employment/whatever?
Evolutionarily, people engage in productive activity in order to secure resources to ensure their survival and reproduction. When these necessary resources are gifted to a person, there is a lower chance that they will decide to take part in economically productive behavior.
You can say that because it is universal, it should level the playing field just at a different starting point, but you are still creating a situation where even incredibly intelligent people will choose to pursue leisure over labor, in fact, the most intelligent people may be the ones to be more aware of the pointlessness of working if they can survive on UBI. Similarly, the most intelligent people will consider the arrangement unfair and unsustainable and instead of devoting their intelligence toward economically productive ventures, they will devote their abilities toward dismantling the system. This is the groundwork of a revolution. The most intelligent will prefer a system where their superior intelligence provides them with sufficient resources to choose a high-quality mate. If they see an arrangement where high-quality mates are being obtained by individuals who they deem to be receiving benefits that they cannot defend/protect adequately, such an arrangement will be dismantled. This evolutionary drive is hundreds of millions of years old. Primitive animals will take resources from others that they observe to be unable to defend their status.
So, overall, UBI will probably be implemented, and it will probably end in economic crisis, revolution, and the resumption of this cycle that has been playing out over and over for centuries.
> You can say that because it is universal, it should level the playing field just at a different starting point, but you are still creating a situation where even incredibly intelligent people will choose to pursue leisure over labor, in fact, the most intelligent people may be the ones to be more aware of the pointlessness of working if they can survive on UBI.
This doesn't seem believable to me, or at least it isn't the whole story. Pre-20th century it seems like most scientific and mathematical discoveries came from people who were born into wealthy families and were able to pursue whatever interested them without concern for whether or not it would make them money. Presumably there were/are many people who could've contributed greatly if they didn't have to worry about putting food on the table.
> The most intelligent will prefer a system where their superior intelligence provides them with sufficient resources to choose a high-quality mate.
In a scenario where UBI is necessary because AI has supplanted human intelligence, it seems like the only way they could return to such a system is by removing both UBI and AI. Remove just UBI and they're still non-competitive economically against the AIs.
> When these necessary resources are gifted to a person, there is a lower chance that they will decide to take part in economically productive behavior.
Source?
Even if that's true though, who cares if AI and robots are doing the work?
What's so bad about allowing people leisure, time to do whatever they want? What are you afraid of?
There are two things bothering me here. The first bit where you're talking about motivations and income driving it seems either very reductive or implying of something that ought to be profoundly upsetting:
- that intelligent people will see that the work they do is pointless if they're paid enough to survive and care for themselves, and not see work as another source of income for better financial security
- that most intelligent people will see it as exploitation and then choose to focus on dismantling the system that levels the playing field
Which sort of doesn't add up. So there are intelligent people who are working right now because they need money and don't have it, while the other intelligent people who are working and employing other people are only doing it to make money and will rebel if they lose some of the money they make.
But then, why doesn't the latter group of intelligent people just stop working if they have enough money? Are they less/more/differently intelligent than the former group? Are we thinking about other, more narrow forms of intelligence when describing either?
Also
> The most intelligent will prefer a system where their superior intelligence provides them with sufficient resources to choose a high-quality mate. If they see an arrangement where high-quality mates are being obtained by individuals who they deem to be receiving benefits that they cannot defend/protect adequately, such an arrangement will be dismantled. This evolutionary drive is hundreds of millions of years old.
I don't want to come off as mocking here - it's hard to take these points seriously. The whole point of civilization is to rise above these behaviours and establish a strong foundation for humanity as a whole. The end goal of social progress and the image of how society should be structured cannot be modeled on systems that existed in the past solely because those failure modes are familiar and we're fine with losing people as long as we know how our systems fail them. That evolutionary drive may be millions of years old, but industrial society has been around for a few centuries, and look at what it's done to the rest of the world.
> Primitive animals will take resources from others that they observe to be unable to defend their status.
Yeah, I don't know what you're getting at with this metaphor. If you're talking predatory behaviour, we have plenty of that going around as things are right now. You don't think something like UBI will help more people "defend their status"?
> it will probably end in economic crisis, revolution, and the resumption of this cycle that has been playing out over and over for centuries
I don't think human civilization has ever been close to this massive or complex or dysfunctional in the past, so this sentence seems meaningless, but I'm no historian.
I guess the thinking goes like this: Why start a business, get a higher paying job etc if you're getting ~2k€/mo in UBI and can live off of that? Since more people will decide against starting a business or increasing their income, productive activity decreases.
I see more people starting businesses because they now have less risk, more people not changing jobs just to get a pay hike. The sort of financial aid UBI would bring might even make people more productive on the whole, since people who are earning have spare income for quality of life, and people with financial risk are able to work without being worried half the day about paying rent and bills.
It's a bit of a dunk on people who see their position as employer/supervisor as a source of power because they can impose financial risk as punishment on people, which happens more often than any of us care to think, but isn't that a win? Or are we conceding that modern society is driven more by stick than carrot and we want it that way?
otherwise, a lot of japanese webpages just seem impossible to navigate to me. Some images are clickable, some aren't, you still have to scroll to reach where you're going. It's just a bit like a maze, and a lot of what you see is kind of useless.